A call to put the ‘public’ back in publication, and make stem cell research findings available to everyone

Thomas Gray probably wasn’t thinking about stem cell research when, in 1750 in his poem “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”, he wrote: “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen”. But a new study says that’s precisely what seems to happen to the findings of many stem cell clinical trials. They take place, but no details of their findings are ever made public. They blush, if they blush at all, unseen.

The study, in the journal Stem Cell Reports, says that only around 45 percent of stem cell clinical trials ever have their results published in peer-reviewed journals. Which means the results of around 55 percent of stem cell clinical trials are never shared with either the public or the scientific community.

Now, this finding apparently is not confined to stem cell research. Previous studies have shown a similar lack of publication of the results of more conventional therapies. Nonetheless, it’s a little disappointing – to say the least – to find out that so much knowledge and potentially valuable data is being lost due to lack of publication.

Definitely not full disclosure

Researchers at the University of Alberta in Canada used the US National Institute of Health’s (NIH) clinicaltrials.gov website as their starting point. They identified 1,052 stem cell clinical trials on the site. Only 393 trials were completed and of these, just 179 (45.4 percent) published their findings in a peer-reviewed journal.

In an interview in The Scientist, Tania Bubela, the lead researcher, says they chose to focus on stem cell clinical trials because of extensive media interest and the high public expectations for the field:

“When you have a field that is accused of over promising in some areas, it is beholden of the researchers in that field to publish the results of their trials so that the public and policy makers can realistically estimate the potential benefits.”

Now, it could be argued that publishing in a peer-reviewed journal is a rather high bar, that many researchers may have submitted articles but were rejected. However, there are other avenues for researchers to publish their findings, such as posting results on the clinicaltrials.gov database. Only 37 teams (3.5 percent) did that.

Why do it?

In the same article in The Scientist, Leigh Turner, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, raises the obvious question:

“The study shows a gap between studies that have taken place and actual publication of the data, so a substantial number of trials testing cell-based interventions are not entering the public domain. The underlying question is, what is the ethical and scientific basis to exposing human research subjects to risk if there is not going to be any meaningful contribution to knowledge at the end of the process?”

In short, why do it if you are not going to let anyone know what you did and what you found?

It’s a particularly relevant question when you consider that much of this research was supported with taxpayer dollars from the NIH and other institutions. So, if the public is paying for this research, doesn’t the public have a right to know what was learned?

Right to know

At CIRM we certainly think so. We expect and encourage all the researchers we fund to publish their findings. There are numerous ways and places to do that. For example, we expect each grantee to post a lay summary of their progress which we publish on our website. Stanford’s Dr. Joseph Wu’s progress reports for his work on heart disease shows you what those look like.

We also require researchers conducting clinical trials that we are funding to submit and post their trial results on the clinicaltrials.gov website.

That is true regardless of whether or not the clinical trial showed it was both safe and effective, or whether it showed it was unsafe and ineffective. We can learn as much from failure as we can from success. But to do that we need to know what the results are.

Publishing only positive findings skews the scientific literature, and public perception of this work. Ignoring the negative could mean that other scientists waste a lot of time and money trying to do something that has already demonstrated it won’t work.

Publication should be a requirement for all research, particularly publicly funded research. It’s time to put the word “public” back in publication.